There’s a peculiar type of stomach pain I get when I care, arguably too much, about a highly-anticipated game. The instinct is to set your expectations low – like, core-of-the-earth low – so whatever comes can’t disappoint. A bit like turning up on a blind date and feeling relieved they can use a knife and fork even though they spend the next ninety minutes talking about their mum.
The problem is Silent Hill 2 Remake is now one of my favourite games of all time, Silent Hill f – wonky combat since addressed – scratched a part of me I didn’t know was itchy, and Silent Hill: Downfall’s developer, Screen Burn Interactive (formerly No Code), is also the team behind the brilliant Observation and Stories Untold. And so: stomach pain.
I got to play the beginning of Silent Hill: Townfall, from the opening credit roll to about four or five hours in, with one brief time jump to let me see an alternate part of Townfall’s world – or Otherworld, to be exact. Before we sat down on the wall of monitors, though, Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto stepped into the blood-red spotlight alongside Screen Burn’s writer and director Jon McKellan, and for an hour or so, I listened to them lie to me. Not maliciously. But lie nonetheless.
Because there’s some delicious sleight of hand at play here between what we’re being told and what, I think, Townfall will actually turn out to be. McKellan says as much when I ask how difficult it is for self-proclaimed fans of the series not to keep remaking Silent Hill 2 over and over again. Yes, you’ll see echoes of themes from prior Silent Hill games, he admits. For starters, Townfall kicks off when a man with a foggy memory enters a foggy town, looking for a woman. “So far, so Silent Hill”, he laughs.
“There are themes that feel very reminiscent of Silent Hill,” he adds. “We are leaning into those expectations. We will be massively subverting those expectations, too. We want people to feel familiar with it, but leverage that. It’s leveraging that familiarity to build something new out of that that surprises players and takes them on a different journey, while somehow still feeling like Silent Hill.”
And that’s genuinely how it feels to play, too. Everything I expect is here. The bewildered man. An empty town. A puzzling – troubling – premise that includes an IV wire and a hospital name band. The aforementioned fog. The prerequisite shadows and sounds right on your periphery.
There are new mysteries, too. A recurring number motif: 204. A ringing phone. An organ-donation box. Why do the boats littering the shoreline – Hannah, Harris, Matthew – all have children’s names? A quick glance at the posters and flyers around the town, and it’s clear St. Amelia wasn’t just frozen, but frozen at a very specific moment in time.
You can feel it: something dreadful has happened here.
“We wanted to build a town that felt extremely authentic, felt like this was a place you could believe existed. A place you could care about,” McKellan says, explaining why Townfall is set in a coastal Scottish town essentially on Screen Burn’s doorstep.
“Players having empathy for the town and understanding what this town’s been through is an important aspect of the story. And you write what you know. We know these communities. We grew up in these communities. It felt like if we were going to set it anywhere, it would feel almost disingenuous if we were to set it in an American town, somewhere that we’ve never experienced and wouldn’t know. There are a lot of reasons why it’s this kind of place and this kind of town, and not in Edinburgh, for example. It’s very specific. I wanted it to be something that seemed as believable as possible, and that was the best way to achieve that.”
Plus, it’s unsettling here. Right from the off. I know – there’s that “so far, so Silent Hill” again – but that quiet, pit-of-your-stomach discomfort never quite goes away. Most doors are locked. Most windows are shuttered. Placards protesting C.E.G. are discarded around a town square monument, and a hand-painted banner – “C.E.G. widows demand justice” – flaps in the breeze. There are For Sale signs everywhere. The local clinic suspended all services “in light of the current situation and its lasting effects”. More ominously still, a sign on the police station simply reads: “Nothing we can do. Stay safe”.
And it’s made worse by the fact this is the first Silent Hill game that’s been set in a gloriously unglamorous British town. I lived through Townfall’s “nostalgic” 1996 (yes, that’s right, 1996 is retro now; I’m not happy about it, either) the first time around. The phones, the TVs, the furniture: it all anchors me in this world far more than any prior Silent Hill instalment has. Which means the uncanny familiarity – the empty shops and the abandoned cars and the flapping bunting – hits all the harder if you too grew up in a sleepy British town.
There are “very specific reasons why the game is set in this era”, McKellan teases. “One, that it is on the cusp of when technology started to explode in the home. We started to get the internet. But also who Simon is, the time it’s taking place in, the type of town that it’s in – all these things are kind of deeply relevant. And by the end of the game, I think people will start to piece together why this is almost like the perfect storm for something to happen in St. Amelia”.
It’s the stickiness of Silent Hill – its symbolism, its secrets, its sickness; the bits that stay with you long after it ends – that Screen Burn is keen to embed into Townfall’s story. McKellan explains that part of this comes from Konami, Annapurna, and Screen Burn coming together to establish their guiding principles. Leading front and centre was story – story, characters, and atmosphere – but also high on the list was preserving its mystery.
“Everyone’s got their own vision of what Silent Hill is,” McKellan explains. “By the time you finish [a Silent Hill] game, I think everyone in our team – we were all discussing afterwards what we thought happened, and what was our interpretation of it. So, it was a deep and meaningful enough story and subjective enough to allow people to really dig into the theories. And it felt like no matter what your favourite Silent Hill was, that was a core theme.”
I can already feel that, by the way. The central mystery – who Simon is, who the woman we’re chasing, Zoe, is, what their relationship is, and why the hell Simon comes to, pulling himself out of the water with a cannula sticking out of his left hand – is incredibly alluring. “Come back to the town and put some things to rest,” Zoe, a nurse with a framed photo of Simon sitting in her hallway, tells us. “I’ve tried, but they need to hear it from you. They listen to you.”
Most of the time, though, her incorporeal words – “Where did you go, Simon?” “You can’t stay in this room forever – I can’t stay in this room forever,” “I know this is going to be hard, but you have to come back to me. Come back to me, Simon,” – make it sound like she’s sitting beside a coma patient, pleading with them to wake up. Which makes a weird kind of sense given Simon’s wearing a hospital band and has an IV cannula still attached, right? I can’t quite let myself believe it, though, because McKellan’s words – “massively subverting expectations” – prevent me from doing so.
I didn’t have a great time with Silent Hill f’s combat – not because it was hard, but because it was insufferably boring pre-patch – whereas Silent Hill 2 Remake’s mannequins took years off my life. Townfall’s combat, in turn, feels well-tuned; meaty, substantial, and manageable if you’re cautious, unforgiving when you’re not. Survival horror jank this is not, but each encounter feels scrappy, not stylish, which means if you swing for something, it’s important to ensure it lands.
You can batter something with a (degradeable: boo!) melee weapon, shoot it with your hysterically antiquated firearm and one of your vanishingly few bullets – if you’re okay with everything in the vicinity hearing the shot, that is – or simply sneak past, which is all pretty standard fare, albeit with what I think is a first for the series: a peek and hide mechanic. They’re absolutely ferocious, though, these things; if they see you, they want you, and they’ll pursue you ruthlessly. They’re fast, cruel, and almost impossible to shake off. I spent a lot of time cowering in bathrooms with the door locked. I’d probably still be in there if I hadn’t had half of Konami and Screen Burn standing behind me, witnessing my cowardice.
On the up side, there are three difficulty settings – story, normal, and nightmare – which will hopefully make it a little more accessible than SHf was at launch, and the CRTV, an evolution of the franchise’s usual radio alert system, is fantastic. Whereas static is usually used in SH games to indicate an enemy’s presence, your handheld TV gives directional clues, as well as an outline of the enemy if they’re close enough. It sounds hand-holdy on paper, but given the enemies are so merciless in a pursuit, it’s a godsend.
When the world is soaked in a blood-red glow, though? That’s when it all ramps up. Every Silent Hill has its own version of the Otherworld, depending on the individual sins of the unfortunate protagonist stuck there, and Townfall’s interpretation is slick. Confident. The setpieces I’ve seen thus far entirely do away with the series’ signature rust and ruin, opting instead for tight, cement corridors, mysterious hatches, and waterlogged tunnels, all permanently bathed in that baleful red-means-scary glow (IYKYK). Later, when my demo fast-travelled me a few hours ahead, the red light leaks into the exterior world, too, where huge, industrial pipes burst through the paving and disappear – well, into nothing. It’s a dizzying, disorientating spectacle.
The puzzles, too, are load-bearing. Each one is reportedly driven by the narrative and meaningfully exists within the world, offering clues as well as challenge. The ones I encountered in my preview weren’t particularly taxing – getting to certain parts of the map was more difficult than completing the puzzles when I got there – but therein lies the magic. Like F’s Ebisugaoka and the town of Silent Hill itself, the more of St. Amelia you uncover in Silent Hill: Townfall, the more unnerving the place becomes. Exploring is always a double-edged sword; you know the places you’ve already been to. You know where the scary things are. Having to find an alleyway to reach a distant map marker isn’t as exciting as it is terrifying, not least because that first-person perspective – presented in 2:35:1 CinemaScope – means I can’t manipulate the bloody camera for a sneaky heads-up.
Oh – and there’s manual saving! I hate manual saving. Having to replay an entire section because of a crash or some other issue is not my idea of a good time, but at least it’s implemented in an interesting way. To save, you must find a phone and “save yourself”. At the same time, you can dial other numbers you’ve happened upon, like the coastguard or the police. The nine-square save icon on the 90s British telephone box sure is a lovely homage, too.
What I’m still not entirely sold on yet is the creature design. Silent Hill is, of course, famed for its symbolism – both overt and opaque – and while almost every iteration has thrown a procession of fleshy, humanoid meatbags at us, I’ll admit it: I was hoping for more here. The fog world is glorious, the Otherworld is striking and disconcerting in all the right ways, but the enemies are just… standard Silent Hill fare. Or at least for now, excluding the one jaw-dropping outlier presented right at the beginning of the game, anyway. I’ll be watching closely to see if, and how, this may change.
There’s more I want to tell you – the sound! (Great!), the stealth! (Hard!), the haptic feedback! (Terrifying!), the multiple endings! (No idea! But I’m told there’s no binary A/B choices, just an ending reflective of consistent game-long behaviours) – but this is already too long, and the more I write, the more pissed off I am that I’m not actively playing it right now. Before I do, though, I’ll leave you with this one tiny, almost inconsequential detail that caught my eye right at the beginning of Konami’s presentation. “Reality and delusion subtly intertwine” teased one deck slide, which feels odd, because… well, your mileage may vary, but Silent Hill has never really been about delusion to me. Guilt, yes. Denial? Lol, of course. Delusion? Not so much. Which leaves me wondering… where, exactly, is Screen Burn taking us on this ride?
As for what’s next for the series? Silent Hill was resuscitated with a bang in 2022 when Konami announced Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, Silent Hill Ascension, and movie Return to Silent Hill all at once, with Silent Hill Short Message shadowdropped thereafter, too. Now, besides Bloober’s Silent Hill 1 Remake, we’ve almost exhausted Konami’s slate. Okamoto – who produces the series – tells me he’s just relieved: “confident and relieved”, especially as the series has generated a number of distinct experiences despite the core pillars that unite them.
“I think the core identity we should cherish for Silent Hill is that we have a strong psychological horror narrative, and as long as that remains intact, we feel that we can be more liberal and experimental with what kind of gameplay we take,” Okamoto says. “So I think that’s very evident in how Silent Hill 2, last year’s Silent Hill F and, of course, Silent Hill: Townfall, are all very different gameplay experiences. We feel that as long as we keep the narrative core intact, there’s very much room to keep the gameplay style changing.”
Reflecting on what it’s like to have been the final project to release from 2022’s hugely busy announcement, McKellan adds: “For us as a team, I think the best way to describe it is utterly terrifying to be the next one in the series. But it goes without saying that it’s an honour to be part of this.
“This is a franchise I grew up with. Silent Hill 1 and 2 became my favourite games when I was a teenager, and the idea that we are now part of this – adding to this franchise that’s so beloved by so many people – is a very strange and awesome feeling. We are understandably nervous about releasing the game, given that Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill f were both incredible experiences… [but] we’re excited to see how we stack up.”
